SFOS 2.0: How do I adjust volume, ringtones and ambiences?

Jolla
- September 29, 2015 06:49

Sailfish OS 2.0 introduced some major changes to how sounds, sound volume and ambiences are handled in Sailfish OS. This article will help you learn how to define your ringtone, notification tones and sound volume. In addition, it will help you manage and customize your ambiences.

To change your ringtone and ringtone volume, please open Settings > System and select “Sounds and feedback”.

Below is a screen capture of this screen on the Tablet:

And below is this screen on the Phone:

1.1 Descriptions of sounds and feedback settings

Tapping on any of the areas will allow you to change the tone for this event.

Note about the "Chat" tone: in addition to being the Instant Message tone, this is the tone that will be played for all Android application notifications.

In this screen you will also be able to define other factors:

Vibration: you can switch vibration to be always on (“Always”), or always off (“Never”). You can also choose to only have the device vibrate when it is on silent (“Only when silent”) or only when sound is on (“Only when sounds on”)

Ringtone volume: adjusts how loud the different ringtones and notification tones play out

System sounds: toggles whether system notifications (such as low battery) should play a sound.

Because the Tablet does not have a vibramotor, on the Tablet you won't see the settings related to vibration.

You can also only define an internet call ringtone on the Tablet.

1.2 Adjusting volume on the fly

In Sailfish you can always use the volume up and down keys to change volume related to what you are doing currently.

If you are not in an application, adjusting volume with the volume keys will adjust your ringtone volume:

If you are in an application, adjusting volume with the volume keys will adjust the application’s volume:

During a phone call you can adjust the incoming volume with the volume keys:

Note: you can only adjust volume down to a certain point, so that you can't accidentally mute the earpiece during a call.

On the Tablet you can use a three-finger swipe up and down to adjust volume:

2 Using ambiences to customize Sailfish OS

Sailfish OS uses ambiences as a means to change the look and sound of your device. Because of their high customizability you can use ambiences as profiles for your device, e.g. "Silent", "Work", "Beep" and so on.

To switch between ambiences, swipe down from outside the top of the screen:

This menu, ("Top menu") will show you ambiences that are marked as favorites. Only after marking an ambient favorite can you switch to it quickly via this top-menu.

If you wish to see and modify all the Ambiences on your device, please go to Settings > System > Ambiences:

Here you can quickly mark an ambient as favorite by tapping on the star, or then tap on the image of the ambience to enter its settings.

Below we’ve entered the settings of the “Freedom” ambience:

Changing sound settings in an ambience’s settings means that you will hear the tones you define here whenever you have this ambience activated.

TIP: You can download custom ringtones e.g. from Zedge. See an example here.

2.1 Note relating to switching between ambiences

If you don’t make changes (or “add actions”) to ambiences here, your device will use either the default Jolla tones visible in Settings > Sounds and Feedback, or tones defined in the ambience you previously had in use.

To have certain tones always play when you have a certain ambience selected, we recommend you define every single action’s notification tone in all of your ambiences.

2.2 Creating an ambience from an image

You can also create an ambience from a photo or any other image on your device.

To create an ambience from a picture, open it in Gallery and select "Create ambience" in the pulley menu: